Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

In the 1920s the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession

Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances, an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent, and more.

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die.

Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z

This is the true story of the real Colonel Fawcett, whose life was the inspiration for the best-selling book The Lost City of Z and an upcoming movie starring Brad Pitt. A thrilling account, it tells of Colonel Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon jungle, which is now considered one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspires his men to take action.

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" So goes the signature introduction of New York Herald star journalist Henry Morton Stanley to renowned explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who had been missing for six years in the wilds of Africa. Into Africa ushers us into the meeting of these remarkable men. In 1866, when Livingstone journeyed into the heart of the African continent in search of the Nile's source, the land was rough, unknown to Europeans, and inhabited by man-eating tribes.

Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya

In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West

On a sunny May morning in 1998 in Cortez, Colorado, three desperados in a stolen truck opened fire on the town cop, shooting him 20 times; then they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and disappeared into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. Self-trained survivalists, the outlaws eluded the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet and a pursuit force that represented more than 75 local, state, and federal police agencies with dozens of SWAT teams, U.S. Army Special Forces....

Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of 12 American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal of these men - who found themselves tested by barbarism, murder, starvation, death, dehydration, and hostile tribes that roamed the desert on camelback - is made indelibly vivid in this gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

For readers and listeners of Jon Krakauer and The Lost City of Z, a remarkable tale of survival and solitude - the true story of a man who lived alone in a tent in the Maine woods, never talking to another person and surviving by stealing supplies from nearby cabins for 27 years.

Empire of Blue Water

He challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades and brought it to its knees. This is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean. Henry Morgan, a 20-year-old Welshman, crossed the Atlantic in 1655, hell-bent on making his fortune. Over the next three decades, his exploits in the Caribbean became legendary. His daring attacks on the mighty Spanish empire on land and at sea determined the fates of kings and queens, and his victories helped shape the destiny of the New World.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.

Walking the Nile

Starting in November 2013 in a forest in Rwanda, where a modest spring spouts a trickle of clear, cold water, Levison Wood set forth on foot, aiming to become the first person to walk the entire length of the Nile. He followed the river for nine months, over 4,000 miles, through six nations - Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, the Republic of Sudan, and Egypt - to the Mediterranean coast.

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men - John Chatterton and John Mattera - are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. While he was at large during the Golden Age of Piracy in the 17th century, Bannister's exploits would have been more notorious than Blackbeard's, more daring than Kidd's, but his story and his ship have been lost to time.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a realistic yet romantic nautical adventure about a young stowaway on the high seas. One day in 1827, Arthur Gordon Pym escapes his dreary life in New Bedford and hides on the Grampus, where he befriends the captain's son, Augustus. The two boys witness and participate in a dazzling series of adventures, including shipwreck, famine, rescue, and voyages all over the world.

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet - having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art - while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins?

The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

Lost in the Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival

Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, but what begins as a dream adventure quickly deteriorates into a dangerous nightmare, and after weeks of wandering in the dense undergrowth, the four backpackers split up into two groups. But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops on the planet.

Blindness

A city is hit by a sudden and strange epidemic of "white blindness", which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there social conventions quickly crumble and the struggle for survival brings out the worst in people.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October, 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in 20 weeks than AIDS has killed in 20 years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century.

Publisher's Summary

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history.

For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle's The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization, which he dubbed "Z", existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett's fate, and the tantalizing clues he left behind about "Z", became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett's party and the lost City of Z. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett's quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle's "green hell". His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett's fate and "Z" form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

What the Critics Say

"The story of Z goes to the heart of the central questions of our age. In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins? A fascinating and brilliant book." (Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point)

David Grann produces a worthy read with "Z". He painstakingly pieces together the mystery of Percy Fawcett's fate while undergoing his own quest. This is an exciting, well documented journey into one man's obsession that alighted the world in the 1920s -- and you'll walk away with a sense of what it was really like to enter an unknown world. The unbelievable hardships and courage to undertake such an adventure will astound -- and just when you think you've got it all figured out -- the ending will amaze.

Held my interest all the way through. The accounts of the incredibly difficult journeys through the Amazon are spell-binding. The fact that these explorers actually carried out and survived these adventures is really amazing. And, the narration was great.

This is a terrific non-fiction book from start to finish. Written from the perspective of a writer about to retrace the 1925 lost expedition of Percy Fawcett, it incorporates Fawcett's obsession with finding a lost city in the Amazon that he has no information about other than having convinced himself it exists. The author smoothly transitions from Fawcett's time to the present and back including historical perspectives of the late 19th, early 20th century. If you've listened to or read 1492, you're familiar with how the New World Indians were considerably more numerous and their culture more advanced until the Europeans arrived with new diseases that decimated their populations. That's wrapped into the interesting conclusion. It's an adventure, an education and provides great insight into the Green Hell of the Amazon.

If you could sum up The Lost City of Z in three words, what would they be?

Adventure, anthropology, mystery

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Lost City of Z?

Any mention of bugs burrowing and living under the skin of the men for long periods of time...I can't get those images out of my head!

Have you listened to any of Mark Deakins’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This was my first.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

No extreme reaction, and definitely no laughing! It was very relate-able though, so I feel like I really got to know the men and what they were going through. This story will stick with me for a while.

Any additional comments?

It was a little dry in places, but isn't most non-fiction? I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a case study in adventure, in native people, in the rain forest, and in human nature. Not that having a movie based on a book should denote its success, but I honestly cannot believe there is not a movie based on this one, given the number of people who tromped off into uncharted territory looking for the original lost crew, and then those who went off looking for them when they didn't return! The amount of fame given to this "Lost City of Z" in it's day is amazing, and that I'd never heard of it before I read this book, even more so! I also thought it was amazing how awful the natives were treated (maimed, tortured, killed by the hundreds and thousands) by early explorers, and that THAT has not received more attention in our history books or by Hollywood. I also read Endurance, about a shipwreck in the Antarctic, and found it absolutely fascinating, if not unbearably unlucky, that one of the men who survived that hell went on to experience this one. All in all, I would recommend this to a friend. If you love history, exploration, and/ or real-life mysteries, this book is for you!

If you could sum up The Lost City of Z in three words, what would they be?

This books tells the fascinating story of world famous explorer Fawcett and his numerous treks to the Amazon. Part history book, cultural analysis and the description of a man whose maniacal quest that put himself and his entire family at risk. Fascinating.

Who was your favorite character and why?

It has to be Fawcett. The term obsessive-compulsive gets thrown around a lot today, after reading this book your definition will change. I guarantee it.

Have you listened to any of Mark Deakins’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No but I thought he did a good job. This is fundamentally a fist person account, and the author is a relatively young man. the author captured his enthusiasm and perspective very well. Solid job.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

It cannot be discounted how much courage it took the author to do what he did. From an apartment in NYC, to a trip to a sporting goods store to going to the Amazon... wow. the authors journey was fascinating and added to the back-story of Fawcett and his maniacal quest.

Any additional comments?

The style of the book is essentially reporting based. There is no real narrative, but several levels of history, current events and historical documentation. If you are interested in learning about this fascinating region, and the efforts to understand it over the years, you will enjoy this book. I did ad I highly recommend it.

I found this book very disappointing. The author often references the excellent River of Doubt, which is what anyone interested in this kind of story should read. I don't know why this book got so much hype, it was one of the few audible titles that I could barely get through.

While I found the overall story interesting, the author had a very confusing way of switching between the present (his own search for Faucett) and Faucett's actual journey. If you really want to read an excellent book about exploring the Amazon, read "River of Doubt" - about Teddy Roosevelt's journey down the Amazon. Much better book.

As a voracious audible listener Im very familiar with publishers marketing of a title. However in this example its misleading. In effect you will listen to the biography, admittedly of a very interesting character, but its not what is advertised.

As another reviewer stated..how many times can you say the same thing in different ways? The answer in this case ad infinitum! The story is disjointed and feels in all honesty like a rewriting of someone's memoirs.

Extensive press raised my expectations that this would be a notable and memorable book.
Unfortunately, the so so writing failed to bring the subject matter to life. This book pails in comparison to RIVER OF DOUBT (though it quotes from this earlier work).
Here's another situation where the author is unable to bring his characters to life on the page -- or to convey the arc of their journey.
The books promise is sadly done in by its feeble execution.
Not terrible...however, I would advise checking out better options first.